O.J. and Media Help Themselves

Regis Philbin . . . “Survivor” . . . “Big Brother.”

Are you gagging yet? Me, too, kid. Enough about them already!

And O.J. Simpson? Arrrrrrgh! Not just gagging, but heaving like a howitzer.

What was said about Richard Nixon after he’d rebounded from the scandal of Watergate, and what some Americans now believe about Bill Clinton, applies also to Simpson:

The only way to stop him is to drive a stake through his heart.

Fat chance.

The Fox News Channel recently reran some of its videotape of Simpson and Denise Brown arguing bitterly last month after he had responded to on-air pleas, during an interview with her, to call and say whether he had taken a lie-detector test in connection with the slayings of his former wife, Nicole, and Ron Goldman. Denise Brown is Nicole’s sister and one of Simpson’s most outspoken public accusers.

Redeploying the FNC tape wasn’t arbitrary, it served as marquee for this week-- O.J. Week on television. Yes, him again.

Included are announced Simpson visits to several FNC shows today, preceded by his “live, unrestricted” interview Tuesday with Katie Couric on NBC’s “Today.” Simpson also had been booked to appear this morning on ABC’s “The View” but was yanked after a behind-the-scenes debate at the show that had to be more interesting than any of the schmoozing it puts on the air.

Coming Thursday, though, is his scheduled appearance on CNN’s legal series, “Burden of Proof,” which could find something for lawyers to argue about in a bag of rocks.

What’s behind this reconstituted Simpson, who was found responsible for those two deaths by a civil jury after being acquitted by a criminal jury? Can you sniff M-O-N-E-Y?

This is another primer on the workings of a medium to which access is negotiable when the benefits are mutual, whether the subject is selling a book, a movie or a tall story. In this milieu, Vlad the Impaler would be as welcome and promotable as Mel Gibson.

The process is symbiotic predation, in which each side at once cannibalizes and gains from the other.

Simpson is a guy you’d love to confine to the sand traps of the golf courses he loves to play. Anything to keep him and his tedious act from the camera. But the profit motive intervenes.

You’d have thought that he had gabbed himself out by now. But he’s back on stage because he and some of the media wish him to be.

The agenda: promoting Simpson’s latest venture, Thursday’s two-hour Internet “chat” session, during which he will generously answer questions for $9.95 a pop. And Alan Greenspan thought he had inflation licked.

Who would pay even a penny to experience Simpson repeat his mantra about being persecuted by the media for murders he didn’t commit? Some of the crowd, no doubt, that found him captivating on “Today” and FNC, both of which were willing to grant him a self-serving shot in front of the camera in exchange for his curious celebrity and ability to draw an audience.

In other words, business as usual.

It would be one thing if Simpson had much news currency, but he drained nearly all of that long ago. Nor was there any chance that his TV interrogators would trip him up on a case he knows far better than they. Or any chance that they would embarrass him about selling his answers for dollars, income that he told Couric would go entirely to charity. Couric was unable to throw him off stride in her civil but firm questioning of him for 18 minutes.

There is a public fascination with perceived evil. Disapproval aside, on some inexplicable level we love our villains as much as we do our heroes, making it no accident that violent crime continues to be big box office in both news and entertainment.

So what Simpson has, and will always have, is the macabre charisma of someone believed by most Americans to have killed two people brutally and gotten away with it. In some circles, that’s a scarlet letter. On TV, where anything and anyone is salable, it’s an infamy that he can cash in at any time.

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SPEAKING OF FNC: Now that the prime-time Emmy nominations have been announced, here’s my choice for the Most Incompetent News Story of the year. It’s Jon Du Pre reporting on the Fox News Channel last week about Damian Monroe Williams being arrested on suspicion of murdering a man whose body was found in a Los Angeles alley.

Williams is the slug whose chopper-televised clobbering of trucker Reginald Denny at Florence and Normandie avenues became a savage metaphor for the L.A. riots that blew across some sections of the city in 1992. They erupted after a Simi Valley state jury’s failure to convict four white LAPD officers in the first of two trials in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King.

Williams was convicted of mayhem and assault for his role in attacks against Denny, who was dragged from his truck, hit in the head with a brick and spat upon. Williams was out on parole when accused of this recent slaying, for which he denies responsibility.

Talk about your revisionist history, though.

Here was the memory-impaired Du Pre commenting live in the field on what Williams did in 1992: “It just might have been one of the sparks that led to a riot that lasted for days.” Three sentences later, his amnesia worsened: “Damian Williams smashed a brick into the head of his victim, and then the riots began.”

Say what?

In other words, the initial King verdict was not a factor? Not even incidental to what happened? Williams’ violence touched off the violence after the violence began?

Oh.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached via e-mail at howard.rosenberg @latimes.com.